As long as merit badges are not fraudulent and are not forked into a million varieties, they are useful. You can’t grant too many.

Merit badges are sort of like gold in this respect, tied to a reality that prevents sudden loss of value.

The bad thing that can happen with merit badges — if you create 30,000 varieties, the credential becomes meaningless. The building a fire in the woods on a moderately dry day with bamboo and switchgrass badge? Really? So what does that tell me, the employer looking at hiring someone in rainy and switchgrass free Washington State?

But the problem with general degrees, like BA’s is that they are more like currency, at least as used in the current system. We set our goal to produce more degrees in our current system, and in the process we caused the value of a high school diploma to be worthless. The result (or at least the result i see on more more morbid days) — the perpetuation and expansion of a large underclass, and a middle-class increasingly burdened by tuition debt — a burden that puts them at the mercy of the corporate system when they graduate — they can’t take some years to goof off in their basement on a project — they have to get a job immediately to pay off massive debt (at least this is true in America).

So, in some sense, although we like to think we are inventing access, we are in many ways fixing the problems of the last access movement.

Those problems — tuition that is destroying the possibilities of our graduates and killing thier potential, and for those that don’t go to college, a permanent membership in the underclass.

I think that should give us pause, to see the law of unintended effects at work there. I think the fact those problems are so prevalent should also be significant impetus to keep us moving forward.

I have been thinking a lot about the ideas of open accreditation, but mostly have been pushing back at the idea. It strikes me that once we move into that sphere, we move away from the question of “what it means for society to have educated citizens” to “education as a means to better employement”.

Thanks for your thoughts as always, D’Arcy.

Some kind of education purposefully uses a “weeding” effect to great advantage, I think– med school, law school, some select philosophy programs. I’m sure there are others. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. There’s a lot of value in knowing that someone we are interacting with has received a specific and known set of credentials even if we know that sometimes those credentials don’t mean as much as we’d like…

I have serious questions about the idea of open accreditation and such (though much of that depends on which kind of open education, of the hundreds of variations we are talking about). I’m sure the skeptical side will have a lot of backers, but it doesn’t hurt for everyone along the line to keep them in mind!

I think time is changing peoples’ perception of the situation, but traction is tough. The conversations are happening and that is something I didn’t expect to see this early on my campus. It is encouraging, but it will be a long journey.